What Works in My Community?
This month kicked off an array of college fairs, high school visits, Open Houses and many other events to attract new students to our colleges and universities. But what are the influences leading these prospective students and families to our campuses? Did we say something specifically to draw them in? Has the relationship been shaped for years and now they are ready for the next step? In my nearly fifteen years of recruitment and marketing college campuses to my community I would say that it took a combination of these things plus more…a lot more. The community in discussion is the first-generation student and their family and other underrepresented groups. Underrepresented groups include students and families that have not traditionally had a college going...
Read MoreWhy We Love Drupal
To completely understand why we love Drupal, it’s important to understand our limitations with our current Web site management and what Drupal is capable of providing. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s understand some fundamentals of what Drupal is and then we can discuss why we love it. What is Drupal? Drupal is an open-source content management framework that’s distributed under the GNU General Public License. Hold your standing ovation Eastern University, it’s not that exhilarating yet. That is, unless you’re a Web designer or developer, then clap away! So, what does this mean in layman’s terms? Open source means the software doesn’t have any license fees and promotes free redistribution. For those who are not...
Read MoreCreation is a BIG Deal
Imagine with me … for a minute. Imagine that approximately 60,000 christian kids and 25,000 christian”‘influencers” are a captive audience for 5 days. Should Eastern be there? 4-5 years ago, Eastern leadership made the commitment to aggressively market Eastern’s College of Arts and Sciences during Creation East & West. Several Jumbotron videos, Main/Fringe Stage announcements and T-Shirt Dare/Trivia give-aways later; CAS marketing is seeing a return on its marketing strategy and tactics. The College with the most T-Shirts wins at Creation. Colleagues have asked me in the past, why are the T-shirts so important? If you have read Malcom Gladwell’s, “Tipping Point,” you may remember his example of...
Read MoreThe Importance of Partnerships
Do you remember when Oldsmobile was trying to alter our view of its vehicles with the campaign, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile”? I grew up with a father loyal to the Oldsmobile brand, and every other year we witnessed him “docking” a mammoth new mega-cruiser in our garage. But then times changed, Oldsmobile failed to adjust to new realities, and they are no more. For consumers, Oldsmobile’s closure seemed abrupt—but in reality, their “failure” happened over a protracted period of time. Last year, higher education marketing expert Brenda Harms sounded an eerily similar alarm to the one Oldsmobile ignored when she addressed a University audience at the annual EduComm conference and said: Being what you’ve always been is not going...
Read MoreWhy Does Eastern Tweet?
Twitter is a social media platform that enables its users to send and read text-based posts that are limited to 140 characters. These posts are known as “tweets”. This platform was created and launched in March of 2006 and has since grown to over 140 million active users who tweet over 340 million messages DAILY! There are reports that Twitter has become one of the most visited websites on the Internet, clearly one of the most powerful social media forces in the world. With all of this in mind, the title of this blog post should really read “why wouldn’t we tweet?” We tweet with various goals in mind, the primary being that we simply want to communicate with our audience in the way that they want to be communicated to. We are seeing a generation of...
Read MoreWhat Does Research Say About Higher Education Web Sites?
We rely heavily on market research that has external validity and “generalizability”. It is through assessing this research, in addition to holding focus groups and evaluating Google Analytics and other data, that we stay abreast of Web site trends and evaluate our Web site accordingly. A high-quality Web site is key to achieving our University goals. One in five students say they removed a school from consideration because of a bad experience on an institution’s Web site (Noel-Levitz, 2011). In terms of the undergraduate college search process, both students and parents serve as target audiences, as 59% of students report they are researching colleges with their parents (66% of parents agree) (Noel-Levitz, 2011). What is the first thing undergraduate...
Read MoreHow Google Analytics Helps
Eastern University uses Google Analytics for web analytics. Google Analytics is a snippet of code that is placed on all of the pages on our website. This code relays data to a portal that we can log into and access in the form of various reports and graphs. This is very helpful data for marketing to interact with. It helps us to evaluate how the www.eastern.edu website is performing along with data on our advertising. Below is an example of data for the month of March, 2012: Google Analytics and Website Performance So, how is this helpful? Well, it’s hard to describe the sheer volume of data that is available. Listed in the overview report above are a small portion of some of the basics in determining how your website is doing. If you compare this data year...
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